This year I was interviewing keynote speakers, exhibitors and participants again (see a short cut of the output below) and also chaired a session on the challenges of delivering learning in organisations across cultural boundaries. It was an interesting discussion – we attempted to understand what these boundaries might be, exploring how they might be interpreted beyond simply geographical and departmental. I was joined by three terrific panelists who presented and discussed these issues eloquently. My thanks goes out to them:

David Mallon, Bersin & Associates, USA
Corporate Learning Goes Borderless: The New Practices of a High-Impact Learning Culture

Virpi Slotte, AAC Global, Finland
Towards Internationalising Online Learning Service – Experiences About 40 Languages

Marion Bruhn-Suhr, University of Hamburg, Germany
Bridging Cultures Through Joint Learning Experiences

You can see the video below:

Moehrle, a Learning consultant and former Chief Learning Officer at Deutsche Bank AG, argues that in many of today’s workplaces, the culture of learning is still a child of the 20th Century: having evolved in an industrialised context, it is not designed for the knowledge-based context into which we are transitioning.

Listen to the podcast here

Simon Russell (Head of Multichannel, John Lewis) shares the John Lewis approach to multichannel customer experience and tells up why transparency is important in winning customers whether online or in store. He makes the very valid point that providing openness regarding price comparisons from competing retailers is better to do in store, where you can sell the benefits of your value added, than forcing them away to do it at home.

Michael Blastland (freelance journalist) tells us not to immediately trust the numbers and how the human mind can be frail and inaccurate in its recognition of ‘patterns’ which may not be there. He tells of how the media can be guilty of creating and fanning misinformation and why you should seriously consider hiring a good statistician at a senior level within your organisation.

More here.

Nowadays we use the Internet as an extension of our brains. If we wish to find out the name of the actor we have just seen in a movie we google it on our computer or smartphone. We can look up the recipe of a dish or re-read a newspaper article we liked at any time online. But this way of accessing information “in the cloud” is changing the way we process and store information.

We no longer try very hard to recall facts, and students are now better able to remember how to find information than the actual information itself.
What are the implications of this for teaching and learning? John Bohannon, a Boston-based journalist for Science magazine and visiting researcher at Harvard University will examine this question in his keynote speech at OEB 2011.

Listen to the podcast here

What stimulates technological innovation? The Canadian journalist Peter Nowak argues that most of the advances in technology that we enjoy today can be traced back to the industries that cater for our most basic instincts: military, porn, and fast food. The microwave oven, for example, is an adaptation of the radar developed for detecting bombers during World War II.

In this podcast interview with Dom Graveson, Peter Nowak shares some of the “I did not know that” moments he provides in his book “Sex, Bombs and Burgers”. And he explains how technology is driving the demand for ‘entrepreneurial learning’, the topic of his keynote speech at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2011.

Listen to the podcast here.

Summary:

Join primary school teacher of over 25 years and lover of creative technology Tim Rylands as he talks to podcaster Dom Graveson about his top ICT tips. Whether you’re looking for ways in which ICT can help you get creative, enhance learning or simply to facilitate your daily life, Tim’s A – Z of ICT tools provides listeners with a wide range of practical tools and techniques.

Podcast link

Link to EDUCA page here.

I am not sure if the world needs another ‘n rules of this or that’ either. However, these are ideas that have been hanging around for a while so I thought I would just put them together into a set of pointers and things to consider if you are developing a stragey for measuring and delivering customer engagement:

1 Be sure of your business objectives online. This one is so obvious, but I am still struck by how many businesses aren’t really sure what they are trying to achieve with their online presence. Awareness, sales, community, customer service, market research are all options to explore.

2 Know how you want to measure these objectives. What does success look like to you? It’s not just numbers of visits or unique visitors to your site that matters, in fact focusing on this can be a dangerous distraction. Look beyond this; what do you actually want people to do once they arrive? What would you call a successful encounter? Define your engagement goals – set the value of each transaction or interaction, and build these values into your analytics.

3 Get organized and plan what you are going to do with the data you are capturing. Buying in the infrastructure is only half the way there… that’s just a big spend of money. Plan your reporting and allow time to analyse and turn the numbers into something your board can understand and make decisions based on. As they say, ‘buying a Gibson doesn’t make you a great guitarist’. You have to understand what it means.. and act upon it… and that takes practice, transparency within the organization, and trial and error.

4 Roll your own reports and analytics. Reports are fine, but the ones you are likely to get canned as defaults within your analytics systems aren’t going to offer you much real value to your specific business. This is because until the analytics are linked to the value of your customer’s interactions, they cant tell you much. (To paraphrase someone: ‘Remember, its not the size of your audience that matters, its what they do that counts’)

… and don’t forget to cross reference the resulting reports with the experiences of your front line customer service people. They know the most about your customers anyway, and are probably trying to be heard. Ignore them at your peril

5 Supplement the numbers with qualitative – the what and the why. Involve your customers where you can. People like to be involved in discussions that contribute to creating new products and services they care about and use. Your audiences, hold them close and consider holding competitors customers closer still… Successful companies are now setting up panels of customers of their competitors and are asking them: why did you go buy elsewhere?

6 Engagement with Social Media is unavoidable outside the business and with Yammer and other internal systems becoming more prevalent, inside too. Learn about it, build it into your digital strategy and look upon it as the source of incredibly rich data and targeted audience exposure it has the potential to be.

7 Integrate online across your customer journey. If your business has shops, use them, don’t cannibalise or set them in competition with online.. Have your staff allow me to compare prices.. John Lewis are introducing free broadband so you can check whether its cheaper elsewhere… customers will always do this, where would you rather have the conversation? In your shop with your trained staff demonstrating the value of buying through you? Or while your customer is looking at a cheaper offer on a competitors web site? Think about it very carefully before setting on division of your business against another… it might seem a great way to drive cost effectiveness, but how will it affect the customer experience?

You can find the rest of the article here

I talk about the value of measuring visitor engagement as opposed to simple numbers (value vs quantity), how to develop a set of values for engagement for your business, and introduce the Digital Maturity Model.

By understanding the ‘digital footprint’ and ‘body language’ of your visitors, you can match the profile of your visitors to that of your content, in real time, delivering compelling, relevant and more persuasive experiences.

You can view the talk here

The WCM software market achieved total worldwide revenue of $1 billion in 2010, despite recessions in many major economies, and Gartner forecasts that it will reach $1.2 billion in 2011 (see “Market Trends: Worldwide Web Content Management Market Is Driven by Enhancements to Online Channels, 2010″).

North America accounts for 61% of revenue, EMEA 28% and Asia/Pacific 11%. Gartner projects that the WCM software market will see a compound annual growth rate of 14% from 2009 to 2014, approximately twice that of the overall enterprise software market.

This growth has led WCM to constitute a greater proportion of the overall enterprise content management (ECM) market than ever. In 2010, WCM accounted for more than 27% of this market.

You can see more on the report here